Network traffic, typically in the form of packets, is transmitted over a network, such as the Internet, from one computer system to another computer system. The content of the packets is initially generated by a process executing on the computer system initiating the transmission. This process generates and/or obtains the data to send to the other computer system (i.e., the receiving computer system). The data is then encoded using, for example, Extensible Markup Language (XML). The encoded data is then sent to the receiving computer system using one or more communication protocols, (e.g., HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP)).
Prior to sending the encoded data to the receiving computer system, metadata is associated with the encoded data. The metadata corresponds to data that is required by the communication protocols. For example, if encoded data is sent using HTTP, one or more of the following pieces of metadata must accompany the encoded data: general-header data, request-header data, response-header data, and entity-header data. The various components associated with each of aforementioned headers are defined in Request for Comments (RFC) 2616—Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1 (June 1999).
The receiving computer system, upon receipt of the encoded data and metadata, processes the encoded data using the metadata. Processing the encoded data typically includes sending the encoded data through the various layers (i.e., physical layer, network layer, transport layer, etc.) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model in the receiving computer system using the metadata, decoding the encoded data using the metadata, and performing the necessary actions on the data (i.e., the encoded data after it has been decoded) to generate a response.
Once the response has been generated, the receiving computer system performs the same steps described above with respect to the computer system initiating the transmission to send the response to the initiating computer system. Specifically, the receiving computer system encodes the response, generates the necessary metadata, and sends the metadata and the encoded response to the computer initiating the transmission using one or more communication protocols.